Version 1.8 of KubeVirt was announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026. The release is aligned with Kubernetes v1.35, and the most significant addition is a Hypervisor Abstraction Layer (HAL) that allows the project to use backends other than KVM. In an announcement post on the CNCF blog, the maintainers announced the new release, broken down by their SIGs. By Matt Saunders